JOHN TAYLOR: THE LAST DEFIANT
JOHN TAYLOR: THE LAST DEFIANT
There is a moment — a very specific moment — that defines John Taylor’s entire life.
It’s June 27, 1844. A jail cell in Carthage, Illinois. Outside, a mob of around two hundred men with blackened faces storms the building. Upstairs, Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum are trapped. John Taylor is in the room with them.
What happens next will be reconstructed and debated and mythologized for the next 180 years.
Hyrum Smith is shot in the face. He falls dead instantly. Joseph Smith rushes to the window — and he goes over the sill. He falls. He’s shot multiple times on the way down. He’s dead before he hits the ground.
And John Taylor — shot four times, bleeding from his thigh, his hip, his wrist, his chest — survives.
One of the bullets hit his pocket watch. Stopped it cold. Saved his life.
The watch stopped at sixteen minutes past five.
He will carry that watch for the rest of his life. He will never have it repaired.
Because this is not a man who forgets what he witnessed. This is not a man who flinches. This is not a man who bends.
JOHN TAYLOR: THE LAST DEFIANT
There is a moment — a very specific moment — that defines John Taylor’s entire life.
It’s June 27, 1844. A jail cell in Carthage, Illinois. Outside, a mob of around two hundred men with blackened faces storms the building. Upstairs, Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum are trapped. John Taylor is in the room with them.
What happens next will be reconstructed and debated and mythologized for the next 180 years.
Hyrum Smith is shot in the face. He falls dead instantly. Joseph Smith rushes to the window — and he goes over the sill. He falls. He’s shot multiple times on the way down. He’s dead before he hits the ground.
And John Taylor — shot four times, bleeding from his thigh, his hip, his wrist, his chest — survives.
One of the bullets hit his pocket watch. Stopped it cold. Saved his life.
The watch stopped at sixteen minutes past five.
He will carry that watch for the rest of his life. He will never have it repaired.
Because this is not a man who forgets what he witnessed. This is not a man who flinches. This is not a man who bends.
John Taylor will spend the next four decades being shot at — not with guns, but with federal law, congressional hearings, marshals, writs, and warrants. And he will respond exactly the same way he responded in that jail cell.
He will not move.
Not one inch.
Not for anyone.
John Taylor. Third president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Survivor of Carthage. Champion of the Constitution — by his own reckoning, at least. The most intellectually formidable leader the early Church produced. And the man who chose to die hiding from the United States government rather than surrender a single inch on what he believed God had commanded.
This is his story. And it is not simple.
PART ONE: MILNTHORPE TO METHODISM — WHERE HE COMES FROM
November 1, 1808. Milnthorpe, Westmorland, England — a small market town in what is now Cumbria, in the northwest of the country. Not industrial. Not elite. The kind of place where your trajectory in life is largely set by the family you’re born into and the trade you learn.
John Taylor’s father is a cooper. A barrel maker. Skilled work — genuinely skilled, not unskilled labor — but not prestigious. Not the kind of profession that opens doors to universities or professional circles. The Taylors are working-to-lower-middle class, and they are Methodist.
That detail — Methodist — matters more than it might look at first glance.
Early nineteenth-century Methodism in England is not a quiet, hymn-singing, Sunday-morning institution. It is emotionally expressive, revival-driven, and intensely focused on personal spiritual experience. It is a movement that believes God speaks to people directly. That visions and impressions and inner witness are real and valid. That the established Church of England, with its bishops and its bureaucracy and its comfortable distance from God, has lost something essential that ordinary people can still find.
John Taylor grows up breathing that air. Personal revelation is normal to him. The idea that official religion has gone wrong — that something needs to be restored, recovered, renewed — is not a radical concept. It is the water he swims in.
He’s also, from an early age, someone who does not simply absorb ideas. He argues with them. Tests them. Pushes back. Even as a young man he’s described as independent, intellectually confident, and genuinely difficult to deal with if you can’t match him. He will not slow down for you. He will not soften his position to spare your feelings. He reads voraciously. He writes well. He has opinions and he is not shy about them.
This is not a man who will drift into anything.
Whatever he commits to, he will have thought through. Whatever he defends, he will defend with everything he has.
PART TWO: THE EMIGRATION AND THE REFORM MOVEMENT
In the early 1830s, Taylor does what a significant number of ambitious young British men are doing: he leaves.
He emigrates to Upper Canada — modern Ontario, near Toronto. The reasons are the same reasons driving tens of thousands of others across the Atlantic. England in the 1830s offers limited upward mobility for the son of a barrel maker. British North America offers something different. Land. Opportunity. The chance to be something more than what your birth assigned you.
He settles. He works. And then something interesting happens.
Before he ever hears the word Mormon, Taylor joins a religious reform group. This group is led by a man named Joseph Fielding — not to be confused with later LDS figures who share similar names — and what they believe is essentially a form of restorationism. They are convinced that original Christianity has been corrupted. That the churches around them — Anglicanism, Methodism, the lot — are incomplete at best, fraudulent at worst. That the true church, with true apostolic authority, needs to be restored to the earth.
Stop and think about what that means for a moment.
By the time John Taylor is in his mid-twenties, he has already concluded that mainstream Christianity is broken. He is already looking for a restoration. He already believes that authority — real, divine, apostolic authority — has been lost from the earth and needs to come back. He is not a contented man sitting comfortably in an existing tradition. He is a man actively searching for something that matches what he believes the New Testament church actually looked like.
He is, in other words, already almost Mormon.
He just doesn’t know it yet.
PART THREE: THE CONVERSION THAT WASN’T REALLY A LEAP
Here’s where the story gets genuinely interesting. Because the way John Taylor comes to Mormonism is not the way conversion stories are usually told.
It’s not a sudden awakening. It’s not a miraculous vision. It’s not someone handing him a pamphlet and his life changing overnight.
It’s more like — recognition.
Joseph Fielding, the leader of Taylor’s reform group, has connections back in England. And through those connections, around 1836, word arrives about a new movement in America led by a man named Joseph Smith. A movement that claims, among other things, that original Christianity has been restored. That divine authority has been returned to earth through angels. That there is a living prophet receiving revelation directly from God. That there is a structure — apostles, elders, a church — that matches the primitive church of the New Testament.
Fielding’s group doesn’t immediately reject this. They investigate it. They compare Mormon claims to their own restorationist framework. They ask whether this might be the thing they’ve been expecting.
And for Taylor, the answer that emerges is: yes. Almost exactly yes.
Mormonism in 1836 is offering him precisely what he already believed was necessary: an apostasy narrative that explains why all existing churches are wrong, a restoration narrative that explains how authority has been returned, and a living prophet who sits at the center of a structured organization claiming to be the true continuation of Christ’s original church.
He didn’t have to be convinced that Christianity was broken. He already believed that.
He didn’t have to be convinced that authority mattered more than just sincerity. He already believed that.
He didn’t have to make a leap. He had to take a step. And that is exactly what makes him dangerous — as a convert, as a leader, as a president. He didn’t stumble into this. He walked in with his eyes open and his convictions already fully loaded.
In 1836, John Taylor is baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
And then he moves. Fast.
This is also a network conversion, not just an individual one. Taylor doesn’t come in alone — much of Fielding’s reform group converts with him. Which means from day one, Taylor arrives in Mormonism not as a lone convert but as a man who already has standing, relationships, and a reputation among people who are now also members. He hits the ground running.
Within two years, he is ordained an apostle.
Two years. Think about that. He goes from convert to the inner ring of leadership in two years.
That doesn’t happen because someone liked his face. It happens because he is already exactly what this movement needs: someone who can argue, write, defend, and lead — and who is absolutely certain he is right.
PART FOUR: THE INTELLECTUAL FORCE — WHAT HE ACTUALLY WROTE
Before we go further, we need to correct a mistake that floats around in casual summaries of John Taylor.
You will sometimes see him credited with writing A Voice of Warning — one of the landmark early texts of Mormon theology. That book was actually written by Parley P. Pratt. Taylor and Pratt were close associates and fellow apostles, which is probably where the confusion originates. But the book is Pratt’s, not Taylor’s.
What Taylor actually wrote is more interesting, and more revealing of who he was.
His major theological work — his actual magnum opus — is An Examination into and an Elucidation of the Great Principle of the Mediation and Atonement of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, published in 1882. The title alone tells you something about the man. This is not a pamphlet. This is not a conversion tract designed for easy reading. It is a sustained, rigorous theological argument, written by someone who had spent decades thinking carefully about doctrine and who wanted to engage seriously with Christian theology on its own terms.
He was also a poet and a lyricist. Taylor wrote hymns that are still sung in LDS congregations today — including ‘Go, Ye Messengers of Glory’ and ‘The Seer, Joseph, The Seer,’ his tribute to Joseph Smith that became a staple of commemorative events. These aren’t throwaway verse. They’re carefully constructed, emotionally resonant pieces that show a man with genuine literary sensibility alongside his theological firepower.
He ran newspapers. As editor of the Times and Seasons — the Church’s flagship publication in Nauvoo — he shaped how the movement communicated with both its own members and the outside world. He was a propagandist in the best sense of the word: someone who understood how to frame an argument, anticipate objections, and respond to critics in print before they could land a damaging blow.
By any measure, John Taylor is the most intellectually formidable figure in the early leadership of the LDS Church. Joseph Smith was the visionary. Brigham Young was the operator. Taylor was the theologian.
PART FIVE: THE EUROPEAN MISSIONS — BUILDING AN EMPIRE OF CONVERTS
Starting in 1839, Taylor begins a series of missions to Europe that will define his administrative and intellectual legacy as much as anything he writes.
The first is the historic 1840 British Mission — one of the most consequential events in early Mormon history. The entire Quorum of the Twelve Apostles crosses the Atlantic and fans out across Great Britain. Taylor’s specific assignments take him to Ireland and the Isle of Man, places where no Mormon missionary had yet preached. He is not just delivering a message. He is opening territory. Establishing congregations from nothing. Baptizing hundreds of people who will eventually emigrate to Utah and form the backbone of the Great Basin settlements.
Then, in 1849, he goes back. This time the assignment is even more ambitious.
Taylor is sent to open missions in France and Germany. Not to visit existing congregations — there are none. To start from zero, in languages he does not initially speak, in countries with deeply entrenched Catholic and Lutheran traditions that will not be hospitable to an American religious movement preaching apostasy and restoration.
He does it anyway.
He establishes the Church’s first French-language journal, the Étoile du Désert — the Star of Deseret. He establishes the first German-language journal, Zion’s Panier — Zion’s Banner. He doesn’t just preach. He builds infrastructure. Publication networks. Translation pipelines. The organizational architecture that a movement needs to survive and grow in a new cultural environment.
And then — the capstone — he supervises and co-translates the first French and German editions of the Book of Mormon, both published in 1852.
Let that sink in. This is a man who arrives in Europe with no established congregations, no local infrastructure, no fluent language skills — and leaves with two functioning national missions, two running journals, and the foundational scripture of his faith translated into two major European languages.
Whatever else you say about John Taylor, that is an extraordinary achievement. The scope of it, the difficulty of it, the sheer organizational willpower it required — it puts him in a category of his own among early Mormon leaders.
PART SIX: CARTHAGE — THE MOMENT THAT MADE HIM
But we have to go back. Because before any of this — before the European missions, before the presidency, before the defiance of federal law — there is one event that precedes everything else in terms of how Taylor understood himself and how the Church understood him.
June 27, 1844. Carthage Jail.
John Taylor is there because he is loyal. Joseph Smith has been arrested on charges connected to the destruction of a printing press — the Nauvoo Expositor, which had published material critical of Smith’s secret polygamy practice. Taylor goes to Carthage with Smith voluntarily. He doesn’t have to be there. He chooses to be there.
What he witnesses that afternoon will be reconstructed from his own detailed account, written shortly after the event. The mob outside. The sudden rush up the stairs. Hyrum Smith shot through the door, dead before he can rise from the floor. Joseph Smith at the window. The shots from outside. Joseph going over the sill and falling.
Taylor takes four bullets. One hits his left thigh. One hits his hip. One hits his left wrist. One strikes his chest — and is stopped by the pocket watch in his vest pocket. The watch absorbs the force of the shot. The crystal is shattered. The hands freeze at 5:16 PM.
He survives by collapsing under a bed and remaining there while the mob searches the room, then retreats.
He never repairs that watch. He keeps it his entire life as a testament — to what he saw, to what he survived, to what he believes it means.
In the Mormon narrative that follows, Taylor’s survival is presented as near-miraculous. The pocket watch becomes an artifact. The four bullet wounds become a mark of authentication — here is a man who bled for the prophet. Who was present at the founding martyrdom. Who did not run.
And the effect on Taylor himself is total. From this point forward, there is no daylight between him and the cause. Whatever doubts, whatever reservations, whatever private uncertainties might have existed — they end here. At Carthage Jail, John Taylor is calcified.
There is no version of him after this that can be reasoned with on foundational questions. No version that will entertain the possibility that maybe the prophet was wrong, or the practice is wrong, or the institution is wrong. He bled for it. He watched men die for it. That kind of wound does not produce flexibility.
That certainty will carry him through everything that follows.
And it will eventually carry him underground.
PART SEVEN: THE YEARS UNDER BRIGHAM YOUNG — LOYALTY AND STRUCTURE
After the succession crisis of 1844 — which we covered in the last episode — Taylor falls in line behind Brigham Young without hesitation. He supports Young’s claim that the Quorum of the Twelve holds the governing authority of the Church. He rejects Sidney Rigdon’s competing claim. He follows Young westward.
In Utah Territory, Taylor becomes one of the pillars of the emerging theocratic structure. He is a territorial official. A missionary coordinator. A senior apostle whose voice carries enormous weight in both religious and civil matters.
He also becomes a key articulator of what this theocratic system actually is, philosophically speaking.
John Taylor is one of the primary architects of what he calls Theodemocracy.
The concept originates with Joseph Smith’s Council of Fifty — a secret organization Smith established in 1844 meant to function as the political government of the Kingdom of God on earth. Taylor was a member of this council and helped draft its constitution. The idea is deceptively sophisticated: it’s not a theocracy in the simple sense of clergy making all the rules. It’s a system where the people vote and participate — the democracy part — but where God directs the government through his living prophet. Divine will and popular participation, operating together. With the prophet’s revelation serving as the ultimate authority when the two conflict.
Taylor coined the term. He believed in it completely. And the logic of Theodemocracy will undergird his resistance to federal authority for the rest of his life. When the U.S. government tells him what he can and cannot do, his response is not simply ‘this is my religion.’ His response is a constitutional and philosophical argument: you are overstepping the bounds of legitimate government. God’s law supersedes man’s law. And I am following God’s law.
He is, by his own lights, not a lawbreaker. He is a constitutionalist defending a higher order.
PART EIGHT: THE INTERREGNUM — THREE YEARS IN THE BALANCE
Brigham Young dies on August 29, 1877.
And for three years — three full years — the Church has no president.
This is the interregnum. The period between Young’s death and Taylor’s formal installation as president in 1880. During this time, the Church is governed collectively by the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, with Taylor serving as president of that body — making him, in practical terms, the most powerful figure in the institution, but without the formal title or the full authority that comes with it.
It is not a quiet three years.
The immediate crisis is Brigham Young’s estate. And it is a disaster.
As we covered in the last episode, Young had spent decades operating in a system where the line between personal wealth and Church property was essentially invisible. Businesses, mills, railroads, land — all of it held under various arrangements that made the true ownership deeply unclear. The Church believes significant assets are its property. Young’s heirs believe they belong to the estate. Creditors have their own claims. Federal scrutiny is ongoing.
Taylor has to navigate this. As the senior leader of the institution, the task of untangling Brigham Young’s financial legacy falls, at least in part, to him. It requires legal maneuvering, internal negotiation, and the kind of administrative patience that is not glamorous but is absolutely essential.
He manages it. Not perfectly, not cleanly, but the institution survives the transition.
And in October 1880, John Taylor is formally sustained as the third president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
PART NINE: THE JUBILEE — THE POPULIST STROKE
His first major act as president is one of the most striking things any Mormon leader has ever done.
1880 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Church’s founding. A jubilee year. And Taylor — steeped as he is in scripture, in Old Testament law, in the idea that God’s kingdom on earth should operate by God’s principles — decides to treat it like one.
In the Old Testament, jubilee years carried specific obligations. Debts were forgiven. Land was returned to its original owners. The slate was wiped clean. The powerful gave back to those who had fallen behind. It was an economic reset built into the divine law.
Taylor enacts a version of this.
He forgives half of the outstanding debts owed by poor members to the Perpetual Emigrating Fund — the revolving loan system Brigham Young had built to finance European converts’ travel to Utah. These are people who arrived in the territory already indebted, worked to pay it off, and for many of them the debt had become a permanent condition. Taylor cuts it in half. Gone. Forgiven.
He also distributes thousands of sheep and cattle directly to impoverished members across the territory.
This is not a small gesture. This is a significant material redistribution by a man who has just taken the helm of a large institution during a financially complicated transition. It costs real resources. And it sends an unmistakable message about what kind of leader he intends to be.
Among the rank and file of the Church — the farmers, the converts, the ordinary families who had crossed an ocean and a continent to build Zion — John Taylor becomes something in that moment. Not just a president. A father figure. A leader who sees them.
It is almost the only soft thing he ever does publicly.
Everything else is going to be a fight.
PART TEN: THE POLYGAMY WAR — DEFIANCE AS DOCTRINE
By the time Taylor becomes president, the United States government has been trying to suppress Mormon polygamy for nearly two decades. The Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act passed in 1862. Enforcement was sporadic during the Civil War and Reconstruction, when Washington had larger concerns. But by the 1880s, the attention is back. And it is sharper than ever.
The Edmunds Act passes in 1882. This is not a vague prohibition. It is a specific, enforceable piece of legislation that makes polygamous cohabitation — not just formal plural marriage, but simply living with multiple wives — a federal misdemeanor. It strips polygamists of the right to vote and the right to hold public office. It creates a five-person commission to oversee Utah elections and exclude polygamists from the polls.
The effect in Utah is immediate and severe. Federal marshals begin actively hunting for polygamists. Men are arrested. Tried. Sent to prison. Women are subpoenaed and forced to testify against their husbands.
Taylor’s response is total, uncompromising refusal.
He does not negotiate. He does not counsel quiet compliance. He does not suggest that perhaps the Church might find a middle path. He does not wring his hands in private while making concessions in public — which is what Brigham Young did more than once. Taylor doesn’t have that gear.
He preaches from the pulpit that plural marriage is a divine commandment that no human law can abrogate. He frames federal enforcement not as law and order but as religious persecution — a government trampling the constitutional rights of its own citizens. He tells his people to resist. Not quietly. Openly.
He calls himself the Champion of Liberty. This is his phrase, his identity, his argument. He is not defying the Constitution, he says. He is defending it. The federal government has overstepped its bounds. The First Amendment protects religious practice. What is being done to the Mormon people is the same kind of tyranny the Founders rebelled against.
It’s a remarkable argument. And it’s one he makes with genuine conviction, genuine legal sophistication, and genuine awareness that most of the country does not agree with him.
He doesn’t care.
He has been shot four times. He watched his prophet die. The opinion of the United States Congress means nothing to him.
PART ELEVEN: THE UNDERGROUND — A PRESIDENT IN HIDING
In February 1885, John Taylor goes underground.
He is 76 years old. He is the president of a church with tens of thousands of members. He is one of the most prominent religious figures in the American West. And he is hiding from federal marshals who want to arrest him for living with his wives.
He will spend the last two and a half years of his life on the run.
Not physically running — he’s an old man, and his health is declining. But moving. Constantly. Between safe houses across the Utah and Arizona territories. Staying with trusted families. Never in the same place long enough for the marshals to close in. Conducting Church business through intermediaries, through letters, through trusted emissaries who carry messages back and forth between the underground president and the institution he still leads.
He does not stop working. He writes sermons. He issues instructions. He makes administrative decisions. He continues to function as the president of the Church from a series of borrowed rooms and sympathetic farms.
And in 1886 — while in hiding, while 78 years old — he marries again.
Her name is Josephine Roueche. She is 26. The age gap is 52 years.
Let that land for a second. A 78-year-old man, hiding from federal marshals, takes a 26-year-old wife in secret. Not because he is forced to. Because he chooses to. As a statement. As an act of defiance against a government he believes has no authority over him.
That is either the most principled thing you’ve ever heard or the most disturbing, depending on your vantage point. Possibly both simultaneously.
The marriage takes place in secret, as everything in his life does now, as part of his ongoing commitment to a practice the federal government has made it illegal for him to continue.
There is also, from 1886, a document that will cast a long shadow over Mormon history.
The 1886 Revelation. A document attributed to Taylor, reportedly received while he was in hiding, which reaffirms in the strongest possible terms that plural marriage can never be abandoned. That God has commanded it. That no earthly authority can revoke a divine commandment. That the Church must continue the practice regardless of legal consequence.
The mainstream LDS Church does not officially canonize this revelation. It has never been included in the standard works. Church historians have raised serious questions about its provenance — whether it was accurately recorded, whether it was embellished after the fact, whether it actually happened the way it’s described.
Those questions have never been answered to anyone’s full satisfaction.
But it doesn’t disappear.
But it doesn’t disappear. Mormon fundamentalist groups — the ones who continue practicing polygamy today, who do not accept the 1890 Manifesto that officially ended the practice for the mainstream Church — cite the 1886 Revelation as their foundational authorization. Taylor’s document, real or embellished or misremembered, becomes the textual anchor for a splinter movement that still exists in the twenty-first century.
That is a significant legacy. And it is not one the mainstream Church is comfortable discussing.
PART TWELVE: THE MARRIAGES — WHAT THE RECORD ACTUALLY SHOWS
Let’s be precise about Taylor’s plural marriages, because the casual version of this story gets some things wrong.
His first marriage is to Leonora Cannon in 1833. Leonora is not a young bride. She is 36 years old. Taylor is 24. She is twelve years his senior. This is a detail that gets lost in the broader narrative about Mormon leaders and young wives — his first marriage is to an older woman, a partnership between adults, and by all accounts a deeply devoted one. Leonora dies in 1868 after 35 years of marriage.
When Taylor begins practicing plural marriage in Nauvoo and Utah, his additional wives are generally in their late teens to twenties — women who are adults by the standards of the time, though the power differential between a senior apostle and a young woman entering a plural household is enormous — and the capacity for genuine free choice is seriously in question.
The most troubling case in terms of raw age gap is the last one. The 1886 marriage to Josephine Roueche. Taylor is 78. She is 26. This marriage takes place while he is in hiding, underground, already in the final chapter of his life. Whatever the theological justification, the human reality of that arrangement — an elderly man in failing health, a 26-year-old woman entering a secret plural marriage during a federal crackdown — is ugly. An elderly man in failing health. A 26-year-old woman. A secret ceremony conducted while the groom is a fugitive from federal law. This is not a situation where consent and freedom of choice can be assumed.
In total, Taylor marries somewhere between seven and twelve women depending on how different types of sealing ceremonies are counted. He fathers over 30 children.
He believed every one of these marriages was a divine commandment. He never recanted. He never apologized. He died before he could be forced to choose between the practice and the institution.
PART THIRTEEN: THE DEATH — A PRESIDENT WHO NEVER SURRENDERED
John Taylor dies on July 25, 1887.
He is in Kaysville, Utah Territory. He is in a safe house. He is still hiding from federal marshals. He has been on the underground for more than two years. He has not seen the inside of his own home, his own office, his own church headquarters — not publicly, not safely — for all of that time.
He is 78 years old. His health has deteriorated significantly over the months of hiding. The physical stress of the underground — the constant movement, the lack of stable routine, the anxiety of being hunted — has taken its toll on a body that is already old.
He dies in hiding. As a fugitive from the law of the country he was leading his people to become part of.
And he dies without seeing the end of the thing he refused to give up.
The 1890 Manifesto — the official announcement by his successor Wilford Woodruff that the Church was suspending the practice of plural marriage — comes three years after Taylor’s death. He never knows it happens. He never has to confront the question of whether he would have signed it.
That question hangs in the air permanently. Given everything he wrote, everything he preached, everything he did in those final years — given the 1886 Revelation and the Theodemocracy arguments and the pocket watch stopped at 5:16 — it is genuinely difficult to imagine John Taylor signing the Manifesto.
Some historians believe it’s impossible.
He was not a man who bent.
PART FOURTEEN: THE LEGACY — WHAT HE LEFT BEHIND
John Taylor leaves behind something that almost no other early Mormon leader leaves: a coherent, sophisticated theological and political philosophy that can be examined, argued with, and engaged on its own terms.
His European missions produce the first French and German editions of the Book of Mormon, two running journals, and a network of converts who form a significant portion of the Utah settlement. His administrative work during the interregnum after Young’s death stabilizes the Church through a genuinely difficult transition. His Jubilee debt forgiveness is one of the most humane acts of any Mormon leader in the nineteenth century. His hymns are still sung. His theological writing is still studied.
His nickname — Champion of Liberty — is still used in official LDS hagiography. He is presented as a defender of religious freedom, a constitutionalist, a man of principle.
And there is truth in that. His argument that the federal government was overstepping constitutional bounds in legislating religious practice is not a frivolous one. It’s an argument that has genuine resonance in American legal and political philosophy, even if his specific application of it — defending a practice that involved real power imbalances and real coercion of women — makes it deeply uncomfortable.
The harder parts of his legacy are harder to look at.
The 1886 Revelation and its role in founding the Mormon fundamentalist movement. The marriages with large age gaps and significant power differentials. The Theodemocracy framework, which sounds philosophically sophisticated but in practice meant that the prophet’s interpretation of God’s will could override any civil authority — a framework that, as we saw with Brigham Young, could produce catastrophic outcomes when the prophet was wrong.
Taylor was never tested the way Young was tested. There is no Mountain Meadows on his ledger. His defiance of federal law, whatever one thinks of it, was a personal act that primarily affected himself and his families. He did not, as far as the record shows, direct violence against anyone.
But the system he defended — the theocratic structure, the Theodemocracy, the idea that divine authority supersedes civil law — is the same system that produced the culture of the Utah Reformation, the climate of fear that preceded Mountain Meadows, the blood atonement rhetoric. Taylor inherited that system from Young and he passed it on intact. The 1890 Manifesto, when it finally came under Woodruff, was in many ways the first serious crack in the wall Taylor had spent his life defending.
He never saw it. Never had to reckon with it.
The pocket watch, still stopped at 5:16, went with him to the grave.
John Taylor is one of those historical figures who resists easy dismissal — which makes him more dangerous, not less. He was brilliant and rigid in equal measure. He was personally courageous and institutionally dangerous. He spent his life defending a system that produced real victims while genuinely, completely, unshakeably believing he was defending freedom.
The early Mormon leadership was full of complicated men. But Taylor is complicated in a way that different because his arguments were real arguments, made with real intellectual force by someone who had actually thought them through. That makes him harder to dismiss than Brigham Young’s brute authoritarianism. Taylor was not a thug. He was a theologian with a coherent system.
And coherent systems built on wrong foundations cause the most damage. Because you can’t just expose the man. You have to dismantle the idea. And he made the idea as solid as he could.